For many Massachusetts Republicans, Gov. Charlie Baker’s administration is the advancement of a dishonest marketing campaign: Baker and Switch. (Run as a Republican, cozy up to Democrats, disown the Republican Party.) Rejected Republicans, perhaps feeling duped from day one, should take note. Baker’s dispiriting drift to the left may just prove to be a stroke of genius for re-election in 2018. It’s a plan without Republicans — the abandoned, fatherless children of Massachusetts politics.
The plan was actually hatched well before President Trump skunked The Party of Ronald Reagan. As a Baker senior adviser, Tim Buckley, told The Atlantic, the governor’s campaign in 2014 focused from the beginning on “showing he could say ‘screw you’ to the Republican Party.” Those words have proven to be prophetic and strategic.
The cold calculus of political reality, as Baker’s team knows, does not favor any Republican in the Commonwealth, let alone an incumbent Republican governor. As of February 2017, there were 4,486,849 registered voters in Massachusetts, with just 479,237 registered Republicans (11 percent of the total). Unenrolled voters numbered 2,424,979 (54 percent) while registered Democrats numbered 1,526,870 (34 percent).
Since the 2014 election, unenrolled voters have increased by 133,824, while Republican voters have increased by only 9,973. Increased unenrolled voter registration is trending upwards, and may accelerate, as Trumpism (a governing style resembling the Coney Island Cyclone) roars through the land.
Even though Baker beat Martha Coakley by just 40,165 votes in 2014, the election was a blue lagoon of civility.
Next year’s election, by comparison, will be a dark pool of uncertainty but will certainly feature a rabid anti-Trump sentiment and, by extension and association, Republican defensive posturing. And in the Commonwealth — what fun! — the proselytizing progressive Sen. Elizabeth Warren will also be on the ballot. Republicans will be the expendables. Something the governor, understandably, wishes to defy for himself.
Baker is an elusive electoral enigma.
He is a social liberal and a fiscal conservative who has melted the cryogenically frozen corpse of {Nelson} Rockefeller Republicanism into new life. He enjoys a 75 percent approval rating in a state where Democrats control 79 percent of the House and 83 percent of the Senate, and Hillary Clinton overwhelmingly won last November (61 percent to Trump’s 33 percent). He maintains a working relationship with House Speaker Robert DeLeo (where massive power resides), whose understated temperament is like his own. And, he operates without a political base, given the minuscule minority status of his party.
Seemingly harboring zero national ambitions, Baker would be the first Republican Massachusetts governor to be re-elected since William Weld, in 1994 (who resigned in 1997 after being nominated as U.S. ambassador to Mexico – a nomination killed by right-wing North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms).
Baker’s survival instincts are validated by this paradoxical fact: Even as prospective Democratic gubernatorial candidates (Setti Warren, Jay Gonzalez and Bob Massie) rightly cite his lack of grand vision for Massachusetts, many Democrats on Beacon Hill quietly concede that state government is functioning better under the bipartisan executive leadership of Baker than it did under his predecessor, Democrat Deval Patrick (who, with contempt for hands-on management, always spoke with a grand vision).
As The Boston Globe noted the other week, “State Democrats turn attention to Trump, not Baker, at convention.”
Still, for conservatives (a fringe of the fringe in the Commonwealth) hoping there might be some application of conservative ideas in this playground of progressivism, there is deep dissatisfaction with the governor. His risky political plan (popularity is perishable; a large unenrolled bloc can shift allegiance quickly) is, some believe, at the expense of foundational principles.
Howie Carr recently wrote in the Boston Herald: “As his first term in the Corner Office {of the State House} continues, it seems that the Republican-in-Name-Only (RINO) governor finds himself more and more ‘disappointed,’ not just with his party affiliation, but also with the drift of public affairs in general.”
That might explain Baker’s puzzling appointment last week of Rosalin Acosta, a Lowell bank executive, as his labor secretary. Acosta (a progressive activist and anti-Trump enthusiast) and her husband this year founded Indivisible Northern Essex, a liberal advocacy group that began supporting progressive candidates around the country. Should a progressive run against Baker, whom would Acosta vote for?
James P. Freeman, an occasional contributor to New England Diary, is a New England-based essayist, former Cape Cod Times columnist and former financial-services executive. This piece first ran in The New Boston Post.
